Hey I just wanted to say I really appreciate how blunt and unapologetically critical you are of the US military history. When I criticize US militarism I feel compelled to hedge and point whatever positives which can be found so I don't sound like I'm being thoughtlessly critical and get dismissed out of hand. But that tends to bleed into how I talk about it with people who agree with me too and even how I think about this stuff. So it's refreshing to see you just say "This is fucked. The end."
This ask is a few months old, but I really appreciate this tbh. Most people feel compelled to backtrack and say nice things about the army in order to not alienate the people they’re talking to, because most folks will honestly stop listening to you otherwise. When debating with pro-military people, conceding that the army does some things right sometimes is mandatory if you want an audience.Â
At some point I just got tired of having to acknowledge these “points” because they really weren’t actual points in the discussion; they’re just distractions from the truth. When you derail a post that says “America has been bad in all wars” by saying “Even the Civil War?” you aren’t actually trying to participate or share information; you’re just trying to make a gotcha that shuts down the discussion. I say, “Soldiers are complicit with war crimes” and you show me a picture of a soldier who rescued a kitten and that somehow settles it. It’s hard.
Not to mention it’s even harder to have these conversations when we disagree on what exactly a positive is. For example, recently I was having a conversation with someone about why they shouldn’t enlist. They mentioned that the US’s military is the biggest in the world, and presented this fact as an inherently positive thing, whereas I view it as an inherently negative.Â
It’s really discouraging that we as a country can’t have an honest discussion about our military, and even if we are successful in pointing out the flaws of the army itself, we never hold the actual soldiers accountable because we must support our troops at any cost.
A few decades ago it was popular opinion to outright hate the army; now you get death threats for criticizing it on a tumblr page lol I wish people would just become Aware, you know? Realize that they themselves have been indoctrinated at the threat of violence and they should be furious that they’ve gone all these years without learning the truth.Â
I think that’s what scares them tbh. People don’t like learning they’ve believed a lie.